Harper's Magazine App Reviews

Difficult to navigate, almost no internet-enabled features. This is one step up from taking snapshots of each magazine page and uploading them as a photo album.

Im not sure why Harpers bothered with offering a digital version, as it provides no features at all. Ive just moved my New Scientist viewing from Zinio to the NS app, but with Harpers thats actually a step backwards. There are none of the features one would expect. Fine magazine, but buy the magazine or read it thru Zinio...

This version crashes instantly on my 5S running the latest iOS version.

about as bad as a mobile content app can get. pay someone else to provide the mobile platform as Harpers is obviously not able.

Wont download and has been a known issue for weeks. Regret subscription.

How such a long standing brilliant publication such as this could release such a less than mediocre app is beyond me. If a modicum of oversight had been done by management...surely this dreck of an app would have stayed beta. Poor if impossible download performance along with no means of keeping your place should you hide or close the app makes this quite a frustrating experience. I expect far more elegance and savvy from such a publisher.

I love the content, but the design, etc was a little unpleasant. If they make it like the Economist app, I will subscribe for 1,000 years. (Especially if they dictate the stories with a British accent.)

You cannot delete an issue without deleting the entire app. Navigation is terrible. What did they fix? They say they were listening to us, but there is no evidence of that in today’s update.

While actually reading the digital magazine on my iPhone is rather straight forward, getting new issues to download, or deleting past issues is maddeningly difficult. The controls arent easily available, say, if one wanted to switch between issues, or download a new issue, etc. I may just stick to reading the hard copy...

Subscribed in Jan, could not download issues and initially thought that it was space on my iPhone. Upgraded to iPhone five and discovered that I still cannot download issues. When I press download it says it is downloading but sits there interminably and I get no magazine. You guys really need to hire new software developers. Such a wonderful magazine and such a continually terrible app.

Great to have a native Harpers app at last, but it could use some work to make it minimally useful. The font size is extremely large and cannot be adjusted at all. This makes for difficult reading and excessive scrolling on both the iPad Air and the iPhone. This is probably the apps most critical flaw. The app also doesnt remember or bookmark where you are in the magazine. There are other issues, but these two really need to be addressed urgently.

I was a print subscriber for five years, and wanted to cut down on how much paper I used so let me subscription lapse and then subscribed on the app because it said it has all the benefits of a print subscription. But then when I attempted to access the archives, they told me the archive was only available to print subscribers. A wasted purchase.

Harpers is always a great read! Dont know why other people have problems with this app. Its perfectly functional for me.

This is by far the worst magazine app Ive used. Navigation is poorly placed (you can only do it by opening an issue). You CANNOT delete issues yourself. You have to wait for the app to sense that your iPad is running low on space. Customer service is a joke...they acted like giving me digital access to the current issue was a gift when I have a subscription paid up through the end of the year. Very poorly designed app. Apple should pull this from the store until its fixed.

I like the ability to navigate the magazine better with the New Yorker. Also you cant adjust the font size as far as I can tell and I dont like the bigger font used in this app. But I love having Harpers on my iPad. Subscription should be cheaper since there is no paper involved but no one else seems to have caught onto that either.

Long time subscriber to Harpers. I was glad they released a digital version. App is clean, but really needs some work. Delete issues downloaded and making navigation less erratic. Sometimes articles will switch and jump for no apparent reason.

Cannot download issues on my iPad. It says downloading but nothing happens. I just downloaded the newest version and I still cannot access the issues. It still says downloading but nothing happens.

I paid for a one-year subscription eight months ago but cant download any issues. Repeated emails to support unanswered. Thats $21.99 down the tubes and I cant get a refund. Not cool, Harpers. What a ripoff.

Any issue. Each time Ive tried, the download stops when its nearly finished. Ive sent a support e-mail to Harpers but it remains unanswered. This is an incredibly poor experience. Please fix this.

Its my favorite magazine, but the app is weak. It doesnt return to where you left it so you have to remember exactly where you were, find the article and scroll down to the right spot... Each and every time, even if you leave it for a second to check an email or text. It doesnt track reading history so there is no way to see what you have already read. Therefore, obviously, it doesnt sync reading history across devices. Font size is not adjustable. The fantastic images and photos are not zoomable. there is no way to get a closer look, even when they are central to a story. The app is locked to portrait orientation. So, For example, a recent article about train travel had a map of the USA with train routes. It was illegible because Its size was limited to the width of an iPhone screen - no zooming, no landscape view. Scrolling slider is too finicky to use reliably. There is no bookmarking, highlighting or searching. Even If the goal was to keep it like the paper version and ignore all the digital possibilities, they failed. At least with paper, you can mark the page you were reading and pickup where you left off. The app developers would do well to look at other news and magazine apps, like the NYT which have already solved all these issues.